A cleft sentence is a sentence formed by a main clause and a subordinate clause, which together express a meaning that could be shown using a simple sentence, but focusing on a particular constituent. This focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation. In linguistics, the sentence is a unit of language, characterised in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. ... A clause is a group of words consisting of a subject and a predicate, although, in non-finite clauses, the subject is often not explicitly given. ...

In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as follows: The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

it + conjugated form of to be + X + subordinate clause

where it is a dummy pronoun and X is usually a noun phrase. The focus is on X, or else on the subordinate clause or some element of it. For example: A dummy pronoun (or, more formally, pleonastic pronoun) is a type of pronoun used in non-pro-drop languages, such as English, when a particular argument of a verb is nonexistent, unknown, irrelevant, already understood, or otherwise not to be spoken of directly, but a reference to the argument (a... In linguistics, a noun phrase is a phrase whose Head is a noun. ...

• It is Joey that we're looking for.
• It's money that I love.
• It was from John that she heard the news.
• It was meeting Jim that really started me off on this new line of work.